Topic: Language

Quotes

Amotz Zahavi, “Reliability in Communication Systems and the Evolution of Altruism” (1977)

• Lowering the costs [of a signaling system] may at first increase the use of the system, but further decrease in cost should destroy it altogether.#

Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

• Humans routinely expect literal meanings to be false, uninformative, banal and/or irrelevant. We may have recourse to a shared code, but that’s never enough. In real life, successful communication presupposes inferential abilities… If language works at all, in other words, it’s because humans have a sense of humour, can detect irony, cope with metaphor, enjoy the absurd. The system works, in short, because we are willing to rejoice in patent falsehoods, valuing them as windows into our own and one another’s minds.#
• No physical entity, then, can be digital in itself. An object’s changing states may serve as digits, but only to a receiver programmed to ignore intermediate states.#
• The communicative use of language presupposes anomalously high levels of mutual cooperation and trust – levels beyond anything which current Darwinian theory can explain.#

M.D. Hauser, “The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” (2002)

• There is a mismatch between the conceptual capacities of animals and the communicative content of their vocal and visual signals. For example, although a wide variety of nonhuman primates have access to rich knowledge of who is related to whom, as well as who is dominant and who is subordinate, their vocalizations only coarsely express such complexities.#Quoted in Chris Knight, “Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language” (2016)

J.R. Hurford, “The Evolution of the Critical Period for Language Acquisition” (1991)

• Modern language gives absolutely no clue whether reproduction or survival was the main channel through which selection pressure for language operated, or indeed whether either was primary.#

Roy Rappaport, “The Sacred in Human Evolution” (1971)

• [The infant] learns to trust before he learns, or perhaps can learn, language. It may be argued that it is the development of this trust that enables him to accept symbolic messages, first from the mother and then from others.#
• The con­cept of the sacred has not only been made possible by symbolic communica­tion, but it has made symbolic communication (upon which human adapta­tion rests) possible. This implies that the idea of the sacred is as old as language and that the evolution of language and of the idea of the sacred were closely related, if not indeed bound together in a single mutual causal process. It may be suggested, further, that the emergence of the sacred was perhaps an instance of the operation of Romer’s Rule, for it possibly helped to maintain the general features of some previously existing social orga­nization in the face of new threats posed by an ever-increasing capacity for lying.#

Roy Rappaport, “Ritual, Sanctity, and Cybernetics” (1971)

• Although man is not, perhaps, the world’s only liar he is surely the world’s foremost liar. Certainly his reliance upon symbolic communication exceeds that of other animals to such an extent that it is probably for man alone that the transmission of false information becomes a serious problem.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to serve my more remote purposes.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

Roy Baumeister & E.J. Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)

• The not entirely satisfactory answers regarding upright posture included freeing the hands for carrying things and making fire. (Extensive tool use came later.) The use of hands for gestural communication may well be a major part of the answer, however. Hominids who used their hands to communicate would then be able to use and share increasingly large quantities of information, which is what humans did. The proliferation of information would likely have created selection advantages for the larger brains—hence the subsequent expansion in brain size.#
• Early hominid communication may have used increasingly specific gestures (sign language) augmented by vocal sounds, which over time was reversed so that, as today, people communicate mainly by speech while still using hand gestures to enhance expression. The evolution of the human brain for speech may have caused the prevalent right-handedness that is normal among humans but not found in other species.#

Bruno Leoni, The Law and Politics (1964)

• Grammarians . . . may have a great influence on the language, and the rules they work out may well react on the linguistic use of their country; but grammarians cannot create a language – they are simply given it.#

Andy Clark & David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind” (1998)

• Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian ‘inner’ minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.#

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1975)

• Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• Language is indeed very deficient, in regard of terms to express precise truth concerning our own minds, and their faculties and operations. Words were first formed to express external things; and those that are applied to express things internal and spiritual, are almost all borrowed, and used in a sort of figurative sense. Whence they are, most of them, attended with a great deal of ambiguity and unfixedness in their signification, occasioning innumerable doubts, difficulties, and confusions, in inquiries and controversies about things of this nature. But language is much less adapted to express things existing in the mind of the incomprehensible deity, precisely as they are.#

Steven Horwitz, “Monetary Exchange as an Extra-Linguistic Social Communication Process” (1992)

• Communication in language is not a veil for reality; it is reality.#